TO LEICESTER. AND NOTTINGHAM

as big and solid as a battle cruiser. Typing then was a
muscular activity* You could ache after it. If you were not
familiar with these vast keyboards, your hand wandered over
them like a child lost in a wood. The noise might have been
that of a shipyard on the Clyde. You would no more have
thought of carrying about one of those grim iron structures
than you would have thought of travelling with a piano.
Since then I have owned machines of wildly different sizes
and shapes and capabilities, and at this very moment possess
several neat little portables, the ingenious implements of my
trade. Just as some men talk about the motor cars they have
driven, so, when I occasionally meet a fellow typewriter-
owner of long and rich experience, I talk about the various
machines I have hammered at. I had a grand talk of this
kind with the general manager that morning, though of
course he did most of the talking, out of a very long and rich
experience. There is romance, the genuine glinting stuff, in
typewriters, and not merely in their development from
clumsy giants into agile dwarfs, but in the history of their
manufacture, which is filled with raids, battles, lonely
pioneers, great gambles, hope, fear, despair, triumph. If
some of our novels could be written by the typewriters instead
of on them, how much better they would be.

A typewriter is a very difficult machine to manufacture
because it has so many parts, from fifteen hundred to two
thousand, mostly tiny; and it must be accurate. Imagine
taking a typewriter to pieces, down to the last tiny screw, and
then giving yourself the job of manufacturing all these parts
and of assembling them accurately afterwards. I went first
through the workshops where the separate parts are made,
It was rather frightening, like finding yourself inside a type-
writer with some colossus hard at work writing on it. There
seemed to be an awful lot of power for the space. There were
dozens and dozens of small machines, of the lathe kind,,